


Life in Monochrome

by hereticalvision



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Artistic Sensibilities, Artists, Crossgen, M/M, Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-21
Updated: 2011-08-21
Packaged: 2017-10-22 21:28:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/242769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hereticalvision/pseuds/hereticalvision
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All art is useless, all love is unrequited</p><p>Albus Severus/Dean Thomas with background Scorpius/Rose, Harry/Ginny, James/Teddy</p>
            </blockquote>





	Life in Monochrome

"You favour oils," said Albus.  
Dean smiled. "You prefer watercolours if I recall."  
Albus tilted his head, exposing more of his throat. His eyes were fixed on the painting; Dean's eyes were fixed on that pale skin.  
"It might be time to try something new," Albus said.

 

Dean Thomas is famous as the world's premiere wizarding artist who eschews wizarding techniques. He takes black and white photographs that don't move no matter how long you look at them and he paints abstract oil canvases which attempt to capture an emotion or feeling with no charms, no magic to evoke it in the viewer.

Truth be told, Dean despises wizarding art. The essence of art is in the ability to convey one moment, one truth. If a portrait can speak, where is the artistry in capturing the personality? If a photograph can move, how can it truly capture an instant of feeling or character?

His most famous work is the portrait of Harry. It's extremely controversial to this day: Harry stands bold in the middle, half his face in shadow, wand drawn, green eyes blazing. The background is fire on one side, with scraps of old Prophet headlines lodged in the textured orange-red oil paint. The headlines are all from the era when the Prophet was calling Harry a liar and denying Voldemort was alive. On the other side in the shadows are the echoes of Harry's losses: a tower with a shadow falling to the ground; a stag, a dog and a wolf in silhouette; children playing to symbolise a lost childhood. At the very bottom is a skinny boy in oversized clothes trapped in a tiny cupboard with his hands over his face. It's the blazing face that caused the most controversy though - Dean depicted Harry's face full not of the righteous fury of a hero, but the despair of someone who deeply regrets what he is going to have to do, and hating every moment of it.

Harry had not commissioned the piece, nor acknowledged it publically, but Ginny had sent a note saying it had moved her to tears. The Ministry hated it, the bidding war had been outrageous and now it hangs in Dean's own gallery. He has other pieces that are dearer to him, but that piece is what made his reputation.

 

Albus first saw Dean's art long before he saw Dean. His parents, doing their best to be supportive of his interest in art had bought him books on all kinds of art movements, historical and modern, wizard and Muggle. It wasn't the portrait of his father that he'd been drawn to. It was a portrait of a woman naked, on all fours and looking over her shoulder. The woman was alive and sexual, picked out in four shades of the same brown, accented with scars picked out in vivid purple. The scars were hideous, covering most of her body but the portrait was fierce and arousing - a woman confident in her body and comfortable with the evidence of her past.

Albus had thought about the use of colour and had begun his own work. He was eighteen and had begun a series of portraits of his family, who were still the most important people in his life.

His father was easy - black with bright green eyes. His mother, soft brown with fierce red hair. His brother, the blue and brown of his Quidditch team. His sister, the yellow and blue of her childhood soft toys. His father had looked at them and said, "They're amazing Albus - but there's one missing."

Albus shook his head. "I don't really want to paint myself."

 

It was Harry who introduced Albus to Dean. Albus had gushed over his work until Ginny had nudged Harry and said, "We could Owl him."

"You know Dean Thomas?" Al said in the tone other people used when they heard who his parents were.  
Dean told Harry to bring his son to the gallery. When they arrived, Al headed straight for the controversial Harry-portrait, having never seen it before.

Dean found him there. "You like it?"

Albus shrugged. "It's daring - but intentionally so. It's a political statement, and a bold one, but it's not a great painting, not compared to some of the others."

Dean's eyebrows rose. "What is?"

"Lavender Brown," he answered unthinking. He still hadn't turned from the painting.

"It's true," Harry said from behind him. "Al did a whole series of portraits in two colours based on that piece. Good to see you Dean."

"Harry," said Dean, shaking his hand. When Dean looked back towards Albus, unmistakeably Harry's son with just a hint of Ginny's softness, Al was staring at him with a strange look of shock on his face.  
Dean took his hand in turn. "I'd love to see your work some time," he said.

Al never looked away.

 

A week later Al went to Dean's studio with his portfolio under his arm. Dean smiled and let him in.

"I smoke menthols sometimes when I paint," said Dean. "Never any other time. Does it bother you?"

"Not at all," Al said, though it did, a little.

Dean waved an expansive hand around the room. "Help yourself." He reached out a hand for Al's folio and their fingers brushed.

 

Al wandered around the studio. Dean was in the middle of four large oil paintings, all in his signature bold colouring, all of people caught in one moment of their lives. Here is a pregnant woman in pink, face contorted and screaming with the agony of childbirth. Here is the back of a woman with long blonde hair picked out in gold, modestly shying away from the artist's eye.

Al turned away and looked at the pictures framed on the walls. They are Dean's black and white photographs - just as intense but more mundane, more every day. A tourist holding a map having someone point the way. Diagon Alley with Uncle George's mangled ear taking up half the frame and the WWW logo sign filling the rest.

"Would you like something to drink?" Dean offered.

Al looked at him and saw the brilliance of a man who understands things about human beings Al has not yet experienced; a man who understands and who can show them to the world. Compassion, loss, pain, hatred, it's all there.

"No thank you." Al gestured his folio. "So?"

"They're good," Dean said. Al waited but nothing else was forthcoming.

"But?" he prompted.

Dean shrugged. "They're safe. They're the loving portraits of a dutiful son. Take a risk."

Al bit his lip. "I can do that."

 

Scorpius Malfoy said, "Tell me what I should be feeling?"

Al shook his head. "Tell me what you feel."

Scorpius shrugged. "She's... naked. I don't know what else to say, really."

Al huffed out an annoyed breath. "Is she sexy?"

Scorpius frowned. "Not really."

Al sighed. "I didn't think so."

"Well if you don't think she's sexy, why should anyone else?"

 

Dean looked at the painting: female hand on taut masculine stomach. The fingers were flexed, nails digging in, stomach arching away.

"It's interesting," he allowed.

Al sighed again.

 

Dean's black and white photographs were full of sensuality. Al stared at them over and over and over again, trying to work out what it was that made them so compelling.

"Maybe you'd understand sex better if you weren't such a virgin," said Lily in her utterly tactless way.

"Thanks, Lils!" he snapped at her.

"But it's true!" she defended herself. "I mean, can you really portray something you haven't experienced?"

"So I should go out and just fuck some random so I can be a better artist?"

Lily's face changed. "No, Al, come on. I get it, you want someone special. But maybe you should try a different subject. Does it have to be sex?"

 

Al is by nature quite a serene person. He is not given to Lily's passionate outbursts or James' dark moods. He is a little afraid that this lack of darkness in him is going to render him mediocre.

 

Al looks at the photographs again. He looks at the vulnerability, the skin, the scars, the use of light, and he thinks of Dean's fingers brushing his, thinks of those fingers leaving oil paint traces on his own and his hand slides down his body.

 

The painting is black and white and grey, like one of Dean's photographs. It is of Al himself, shirtless, kneeling next to a bed with his face turned up to look at something outside the picture with a terribly vulnerable desire. There he is, open and exposed, stripped to his core.

He took it to Dean's studio, arrived unannounced.

Dean looked at it for a long time. "Well. For the first time I feel like I see you."

Al smiled, large and genuine. "Really?"

Dean nodded.

Al didn't know where to go from there.

"I like the use of shading, the choice of monochrome," said Dean, following the painting's composition. The portrait of Al is electrifying, truth be told. Al is naked and honest - obviously inexperienced, obviously eager, obviously feeling a deep desire. "The oils are lovely, the way they blur together. Wonderful."

"You favour oils," said Albus.

Dean smiled. "You prefer watercolours if I recall."

Albus tilted his head, exposing more of his throat. His eyes were fixed on the painting; Dean's eyes were fixed on that pale skin.

"It might be time to try something new," Albus said. His eyes shifted back to Dean's face, his expression clouding into something like his portrait's - and he reached out on some sudden impulse and Al's breath mixed with Dean's for just a moment before Dean closed the final distance between them.

 

There are paintings and paintings and paintings on the walls of the studio. Al has painted Dean over and over again. The shape of his lips pressed into Al's wrist, the top of his head when his face is pressed into Al's stomach. Dean's hand curled around Al's shoulder. Longing in every stroke of the brush, back to his signature watercolours in shades of grey accented with silver.

And Al sees it in others too now. He paints Scorpius kissing Rose with his eyes closed and his mouth open, desperation in the way his hand finds its way down her back. He paints James sending a searing look at Teddy and never shows anyone because he doesn't want James to know he noticed.  
The paintings stack up and stack up , but Al never paints the way Dean makes him feel in its totality. He doesn't feel up to the task.

 

It has been several months of Dean's menthol mouth and lying to his parents about the exact nature of their relationship. It is starting to occur to Al that while his whole life has been flipped over, Dean does little more than indulge him. He lets Al sketch his hands and his mouth and he lets Al pull him into bedrooms and walls, but he never initiates anything. He is never really there.

 

"I noticed a theme in your work," said Al over dinner one night.

"Oh?" said Dean.

Al nodded. "Lavender Brown is purple and brown. Seamus Finnegan is yellow and blue. Terry Boot is navy and silver. Luna Lovegood is pink and gold..."

Dean nodded. "And?"

"And I, apparently, am black and grey." On the canvas that Al found that day, he is looking out of the frame with a shocked expression and swollen lips. He is as vulnerable as he has ever been, sexually aware and afraid but yearning. Al stared at himself for quite a while, feeling sicker all the time.

Dean nodded again.

"They were all your lovers, weren't they?"

Dean raised an eyebrow. "Al, I am over forty. I have had many lovers."

Al blinked rapidly. "I knew that. I just didn't know I was only one of the line to you."

Dean sighed. "I do care for you, Al."

Al shook his head in revulsion. "I painted my family in the motif you use for your conquests."

"It isn't like that, Al," Dean said. "But if you like, of course, we can end this here."

Dean is so contained that Al could scream. Instead he says simply, "Did no one ever matter?"

 

Al should thank Dean, really. He understands about heartbreak now, too. Now he can paint Lily playful and merry but with something broken in her eyes. Now he can paint Scorpius's father, proud and regretful, full of misunderstood promises for the future, every one shattered.

His first exhibition is a success. The two-tone portraits have been abandoned in favour of a full spectrum palette, highlighted with metallics. Al likes to mix his media, and receives praise for his unique perspective.

Dean does not come to the exhibition.

 

Al gets an Owl one day, long after that last night in Dean's studio. The note says simply, _Someone_. The Owl also contains a sketch of a woman in red-gold and hazel-brown, the date on the corner before Al was even born. Al stares at it for a long time, his mouth forming an O. Then he scrunches the sketch up in his hand and with a wandless _Incendio_ it's gone.


End file.
